I think that the base price of the Cube was actually pretty reasonable--it's just that once you tack on one of the cool Apple monitors which you pretty much had to get with the Cube, the price really went wild.
Feature-wise, it was similar to a good amount worse, depending on your perspective and bias, than the G4. Depends how much silence and size and style count as features, as opposed to MHz and expandability.
I hope it's like the iMac, where the first version was cool but overpriced and still had some engineering ugliness, but by a year later was an almost perfect machine.
I'm really interested in seeing what the laptop equivalent of the Cube will be. The Square? The Rectangle? I expect it to be a superlight, superthin full-powered notebook.
Calm, calm, people! A credit card with a barcode would be just as secure as a credit card with the numbers printed on it. The idea is that you have to keep the barcode just as private as you currently do your credit card (and if your credit card had the barcode...). But the CueCat would make the process of inputting your credit card information into a computer drastically easier, without it being less secure.
Of course, if their encryption is crappy, and the information gets sent to CueCat and they can decode it, then it's not really so good at all.
It's certainly true that CueCat doesn't make barcodes any more secure. But you could use your CueCat to read in, for example, a public key in one fell swoop. It's really all about the fact that bar code readers are a good way to get from real world to digital world, and now someone's ponied up the dollars to make one that can connect to the Internet (and then distribute tons of them). The automatic encryption is just a cherry (and maybe even not much of one).
Yeah, the encryption really isn't that exciting, and the article probably did imply incorrect things, but it's not as bad as some of the above responses are making it out to be.
The above comment was poorly moderated, as the post is mildly sarcastic and genuinely original. Real flamebait would have been, "Ohh, computers that blow up? How original. My mom could kick your mom's ASS!"
It's fun looking at the patent references; stacks of lame-ass patents all made in the last 10 years.
"Method and system for managing communications within a collaborative data processing system" etc.
This is exactly the type of thing Borsook was talking about in her book--she was amazed that the underappreciated, downtrodden nerd didn't associate with other underappreciated downtrodden people, like minorities, environmentalists, labor, etc. but rather associated with big business.
Now we're learning that big business isn't the nerd's friend any more than big government is; and the difference is that it's actually possible to get big government to be on your side through the democratic/lobbying/activism process, where big business will always only be on the side of profit, which may or may not be in the nerds' best interest.
And it's always a good bet that small government (i.e. local, or all those other downtrodden minorities) can be on the nerd's side if a little activism takes place.
So support the EFF and ACLU, and build coalitions with other activists, as is starting to happen at the coalition demonstrations like those in Seattle, Philly, and LA. Prague's coming up!
Note that the demonstrations, while valuable and important, are less effective than lobbying and working with the system, especially since we're talking about national law-making, not local problems (like police violence) or global problems (like the World Bank), though there are plently of local and global considerations.
Icejai's comment certainly isn't offtopic. Inane,
perhaps, but offtopic? It is a lame first post, but "lame" and "inane" aren't options. Maybe redundant. Maybe.
This link doesn't have decss in it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=css+dvd+download& btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky
This link goes through akamai and google and doesn't mention decss.
http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.google.co m/search?q=css+dvd+download&btnI=I'm+Feeli ng+Lucky
This link goes through go.com, akamai, and google and doesn't mention decss:
http://transfer.go.com/cgi/transfer.pl?goto=http ://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.google. com/search?q=css+dvd+download&btnI=I'm%2BFeeling%2 BLucky
Remember that when you say "most people" you mean "most OS researchers".
Anyone else (and maybe they're just idiots who have been mindfucked by the ParcMacWin conspiracy) would agree with Every. To them Windows, MacOS, and the RedHat distro are OS's.
It's funny that we just had a discussion about computer historians, where many people took the attitude that they're either unnecessary or just store obsolete equipment (that's an archivist, not a historian!), when this thread is a perfect example of why we need computer historians.
Sadly, words and language is not a simple formal system, as the usage of it falls into the category of communal consensual reality.
Definitions evolve and competing definitions can coexist. It's fuzzy logic; there are no absolute truth values here. But I'm no semantician; there have been many people who have spent a lot more time and intelligence dealing with the issue than I.
It really does frustrate me how juvenile so much of the discussion is here; and I don't simply mean the "Mac Suxors" comments. I'm also referring to the sloppy rhetoric that people use, employing nearly every logical fallacy under the sun, and there are a lot of them.
The most frustrating thing is that everyone on Slashdot isn't a juvenile; if they were, the juvenile behavior would be not unreasonable.
As someone who interned on the Hill, politicians read both their email and letters (where politician==staff); mass mailings are largely ignored. Mass mailings in snail mail form are popular; institutionalized grass-roots-level special interest groups (e.g. labor, religious organizations) will often give their members forms to fill out and send to their representatives. The volume is recognized, but you're not likely to get a reply if you send in something like that.
In fact, serious, well-constructed arguments are surprisingly likely to have an effect on the politician. Any letter written with any real level of seriousness, at least in the office I worked at, would get a reply. Any letter that couldn't properly be answered by a form letter (and they do have catalogs of them) will thus be read and answered by the person responsible for the policy. If you write a letter pertinent to the bills being currently debated, you're more likely to get a better answer, and you may even see your words or ideas reflected on the floor.
One trick in your letter is to claim that you got a form letter the last time. Another thing to do is to help the interns sort your mail properly. For example, if you're writing to a senator on the Labor Committee about a health issue, say that in the subject/on the envelope. If your rep has a web page that names his staff, feel free to write to the attn of the particular staff member that should handle your question/concern.
Of course, you can really only expect this of your representatives (and maybe committee chairs). If you have a disagreement with a particular rep that's not your own, write to your own rep to complain. That's why they're called "representatives".
To get back to the point, unless the staff is entirely incompentent, and they rarely are (though you can certainly expect the staff of a junior rep in the minority party to be drastically smaller and less experienced than the staff of a senior senator with a chairship), mass emails and snail-mails don't overwhelm the individual messages.
I personally think it's pretty accurate. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree, but there is evidence that supports Borsook's position, both anecdotal and empirical, though one can mount arguments/attacks against either form.
Anecdotal evidence is a lot easier to refute, but the empirical evidence includes the low rate of charitable giving in Silicon Valley, statistical analysis of Usenet discussions, statistical analysis of tech-oriented convention topics (like hacker cons, bionomics conference, etc.), statistical analysis of Wired articles, etc.
Of course, one can say that Usenet, tech-cons, Wired, etc. aren't truly representative of tech culture, but then, what are? Maybe it's just the loudmouths of technoculture/hackerdom that are libertarian (small l!) but it's pretty difficult to gather empirical evidence on unrecorded views.
Borsook isn't saying that everyone's a Randian, polyamorist, or free software / open source zealot; she is saying that the tech-culture (by which she is particularly referring to computer culture rather than the scientific community, biology etc.) is dominated by what she refers to as "technolibertarianism". It's "little l libertarianism" instead of "capital L Libertariansim", more an emotional/gestalt attitude than necessarily a political philosophical position. I'd say that most coders/admins (and admins in particular) have a certain deep belief in self-entitlement--they really believed that they worked hard to get where they are, and continue to work hard, and noone really helped them or encouraged them, and that they're underappreciated--and that belief extends to their understanding (or lack thereof) of history and their place in it, their feelings about societal responsibility, their feelings about government (the US government, and the institution in general), etc.
Tied into that is a degree of arrested development, a glorification of adolescent ideals (guns, cool toys, etc.), a level of social gaucheness, that can both be good--it's certainly not bad to be a bit childlike, and be more honest and excitable about beauty than some postmodern jaded bohemian, but it is bad to be childish.
Today's culture in general pushes people to become uneducated cynics, rebels without a cause. It's easy to get trapped in a teenager-like mold, where you've realized that nothing is perfect but you don't know what to do about it. It's pretty hard to find faith in this world. This is more true for techies, perhaps, than anyone else, to whom the promise of technology is so clear but the imperfection, even ugliness, of society is also so apparent.
Pretty much all Borsook is saying is that techies fall into the trap of trying to ignore, denigrate, or escape society. But they can't--especially when they're becoming ever more responsible for it. All of the topics in her book focus on just that, the intersection of techies and social change, through the Bionomics conferences, and Wired magazine, and the cypherpunks, and charity--and those intersections all are definably libertarian.
It's my fault; I submitted the review originally for Adam, and then posted it when Jon Katz wrote his article. I feel guilty now because I knew the review hadn't been rejected, but I wanted to put it up in response to Katz. So this review has appeared twice on Slashdot, but as another person said, now everyone who turns off Jon Katz can read it. Or is it Jon Katz who turns everyone off?
Reason does allow for personal, non-commercial reproduction. However, since Slashdot is a commercial venture, I'd say that copying it onto Slashdot does violate their copyright. However, since Reason would have to rely on the government in an attempt to enforce its copyright, I guess you're safe.
Re:What she conveniently left out.....
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 2
Somehow I'm a little confused by the idea that the tech industry was in its early days in the 1980's.
Then again, that's the kind of "there is no history" attitude that Borsook discusses.
I suspect I'm just misinterpreting you; did you really mean to say what you said?
The review seems to misfiring on a number of points, while being valid on some others, not unlike Cyberselfish itself. The reviewer seems to believe that Borsook is directly attacking libertarianism. She's not. She's attacking what she calls "technolibertarianism" in particular, which is a less reasoned and more emotional mindset than that of a libertarian like the reviewer.
To that end, I can't say that I'm particularly convinced by the reviewer's defense against Borsook's two big arguments, which he delineates clearly in his review: "First, high-tech people have no right to attack government since their industry would not have existed without government funding. Second, successful businesses are successful because they operate in a world where governments keep schools going, food and drugs pure, banks honest, and the like."
His defense against both are ideological, pretty much "Libertarians don't believe that, we believe in spontaneous order." I think that the reviewer is accurate when he says "...[libertarians'] strongly expressed belief in a philosophy she only half-understands but associates with stinginess disturbs her."
It may be more accurate to say that Borsook only half-understands the strongly expressed belief in libertarianism, because she's never seen it work, and the closest examples to a libertarian system she can find are disasters (post-communist Russia, etc.), and most of the libertarians she meets are misogynist, or antisocial, or emotionally stunted, or selfish.
I'm kind of annoyed; I submitted this review a week ago, but it was ignored (or was it?). You can judge if it deserved to be posted. Noting that I wrote this to be a/. book review instead of a response to Jon Katz, here it is:
author: Pulina Borsook publisher: PublicAffairs ISBN: 1891620789 pages: 256 rating: 8/10 summary: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech
I heard about Cyberselfish when driving around Vermont Memorial Day weekend from used bookstore to used bookstore. The NPR station was broadcasting an interview with Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook, a writer who worked for Wired during its glory years. I was put off by the book's wretched title, but engrossed by the subject: the powerful undercurrent of libertarianism that flows through high-tech circles. I have been astounded but not amazed at the deeply adolescent and peevish libertarian attitudes that so many techies cling to, from gun worship to fear of governmental Internet regulation. Listening to Borsook speak intelligently and cogently about technolibertarianism made me want her book very much.
This month I garnered a copy of Cyberselfish, and I'm still appalled with the title (which comes from an eponymous essay for Mother Jones she wrote in July 1996, when such cyberlanguage wasn't so cybertrite). Cyberselfish is a book-length essay, in fact a somewhat thinly edited series of linked essays. There's a rush of immediacy and wit; for a random example, "Polyamory is the preferred term of art; it's gender-neutral, where polygamy and polyandry are not, and allows for all persuasions of partner choice (gay/straight/bi/it depends)." With the freshness and informality comes flaws. There is too much repeated material in the book. It's clear that essays written at different times have been cobbled together. Reading the book straight through is like reading some multivolume series straight through, in which the characters and history are rehashed at the beginning of each book.
Cyberselfish looks at a few specific examples of technolibertarianism in depth: Bionomics, cypherpunks, Wired magazine, and Silicon Valley's impressive lack of philanthropy. Each time Borsook exposes the compassionless, fearful, posturing, politically myopic core, without dismissing the good aspects of the high-tech culture and individuals. For example, she thinks fighting for privacy rights is good, but obsessing about it and descending into rabid, paranoid ranting on alt.cypherpunks is scary. She moves smoothly from the historical to the academic to the personal, deliberately exposing her own frailities and biases while she examines those of others.
To give a deeper example of the content of Cyberselfish, Bionomics is the use of biological (and particularly Darwinian) metaphors to describe economic processes, as popularized by Michael Rothschild (Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem) and then the The Bionomics Institute (TBI). Borsook convincingly points out through both empirical observation and reasoned analysis that Bionomics boils down to economic libertarianism, where government involvement is wrong and the most cut-throat, efficient and entrepeneurial businesses are the best. Ecological metaphors are used in Bionomics only when they're useful and sexy: The ecosystem of Hawaii was used as a metaphor for the fragility of protected industries. Under Bionomics logic, Hawaii's beautiful, lush, peaceful ecosystem is to be derided. Bionomics uses metaphors to draw syllogistic conclusions. Doing that can be powerfully convincing but amounts to hand-waving and emotional appeals. Borsook cuts through the smoke and mirrors.
After a few years, the Bionomics Institute conferences were (literally) taken over by the Cato Institute, the premier libertarian think tank in the nation. The annual Bionomics conterences began in 1993. The 1997 conference was the Cato/Bionomics Conference; 1998, the "Annual Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP Conference on Technology and Society." TBI morphed into software-startup Maxager, which intends to offer Bionomical tools to companies. Borsook wonders what meaning can be ascribed to the success or the failure of the company. If Maxager fails, is it because it wasn't Bionomically good enough, or just because of the many uncontrollable factors that cause the vast majority of startups to fail? If it succeeds, does it validate Bionomics, or just the good connections the founder has with Silicon Valley venture capitalists?
The other chapters are just as interesting. Cyberselfish sharply describes all the archetypes of the technolibertarians, from the neo-hippie polyandric Burning Man attendee to the Lexus-driving, 100-hour-a-week, plugged-in entrepeneur with a sprawling bungalow in Santa Clara county.
One of the most crystalline passages in the book describes Eric Raymond's leaking of the Halloween Document, written by Microsoft program manager Vinod Valloppillil. The two clearly have vast ideological differences, the open-source cowboy and the Evil Empire functionary, but they're both hard-core libertarians, an entirely unreported fact. In Borsook's words, "It was rather like discovering that both a liberal and a conservative senator had both acquired their law degrees from Yale: no news here."
As I said before, the book is somewhat haphazardly put together, and nearly every sentence is to some degree contentious; even someone who agrees with her basic position will find reason to quibble. Cyberselfish doesn't come near to answering all the questions it raises. Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians celebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective. What does it mean to be an Open Source libertarian?
I personally think it's somewhat unfair to attack those flaws, as they're inexorably part of Cyberselfish's loose, immediate, opinionated, and conversational style. It's kind of like how Slashdot's open forums allow for a review like this and the inevitable "hot grits" responses.
Never mind; they fixed the pictures. There were originally only two pictures instead of three; the top picture was of Emmanuel and Macki standing next to each other. The picture of Jon is new.
Jes so you know, the bluehaired guy is not Jon Johansen. It's Makie, a 2600/cDc guy. Jon Johansen is a crewcut, glasses wearing kid. Makie and Jon do both look eternally sleep deprived.
I'd just like to say that I don't really consider the post flamebait, and I don't currently have any moderator points to throw around. The attitude is definitely flammable, but the point is real.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the base price of the Cube was actually pretty reasonable--it's just that once you tack on one of the cool Apple monitors which you pretty much had to get with the Cube, the price really went wild.
Feature-wise, it was similar to a good amount worse, depending on your perspective and bias, than the G4. Depends how much silence and size and style count as features, as opposed to MHz and expandability.
I hope it's like the iMac, where the first version was cool but overpriced and still had some engineering ugliness, but by a year later was an almost perfect machine.
I'm really interested in seeing what the laptop equivalent of the Cube will be. The Square? The Rectangle? I expect it to be a superlight, superthin full-powered notebook.
Is this really a troll? Offtopic, maybe.
Calm, calm, people! A credit card with a barcode would be just as secure as a credit card with the numbers printed on it. The idea is that you have to keep the barcode just as private as you currently do your credit card (and if your credit card had the barcode...). But the CueCat would make the process of inputting your credit card information into a computer drastically easier, without it being less secure.
Of course, if their encryption is crappy, and the information gets sent to CueCat and they can decode it, then it's not really so good at all.
It's certainly true that CueCat doesn't make barcodes any more secure. But you could use your CueCat to read in, for example, a public key in one fell swoop. It's really all about the fact that bar code readers are a good way to get from real world to digital world, and now someone's ponied up the dollars to make one that can connect to the Internet (and then distribute tons of them). The automatic encryption is just a cherry (and maybe even not much of one).
Yeah, the encryption really isn't that exciting, and the article probably did imply incorrect things, but it's not as bad as some of the above responses are making it out to be.
The above comment was poorly moderated, as the post is mildly sarcastic and genuinely original. Real flamebait would have been, "Ohh, computers that blow up? How original. My mom could kick your mom's ASS!"
Just to cover my butt, my example may actually be a good patent (if the "method and system" are very particular), but it still sounds pretty sketchy.
Also, I'm just not at all happy about the patenting of algorithms and business processes.
It's fun looking at the patent references; stacks of lame-ass patents all made in the last 10 years.
"Method and system for managing communications within a collaborative data processing system" etc.
This is exactly the type of thing Borsook was talking about in her book--she was amazed that the underappreciated, downtrodden nerd didn't associate with other underappreciated downtrodden people, like minorities, environmentalists, labor, etc. but rather associated with big business.
Now we're learning that big business isn't the nerd's friend any more than big government is; and the difference is that it's actually possible to get big government to be on your side through the democratic/lobbying/activism process, where big business will always only be on the side of profit, which may or may not be in the nerds' best interest.
And it's always a good bet that small government (i.e. local, or all those other downtrodden minorities) can be on the nerd's side if a little activism takes place.
So support the EFF and ACLU, and build coalitions with other activists, as is starting to happen at the coalition demonstrations like those in Seattle, Philly, and LA. Prague's coming up!
Note that the demonstrations, while valuable and important, are less effective than lobbying and working with the system, especially since we're talking about national law-making, not local problems (like police violence) or global problems (like the World Bank), though there are plently of local and global considerations.
Icejai's comment certainly isn't offtopic. Inane,
perhaps, but offtopic? It is a lame first post, but "lame" and "inane" aren't options. Maybe redundant. Maybe.
Hmm...is this illegal?
I =I'm+Feeling+Lucky
I =I'm+Feeling+Lucky
e eling+Lucky
t nI=I'm%20Feeling%20Lucky
& btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky
o m/search?q=css+dvd+download&btnI=I'm+Feeli ng+Lucky
p ://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.google. com/search?q=css+dvd+download&btnI=I'm%2BFeeling%2 BLucky
http://www.google.com/search?q=decss+mirror&btn
http://www.google.com/search?q=decss+source&btn
http://www.google.com/search?q=decss&btnI=I'm+F
http://www.google.com/search?q=decss+download&b
This link doesn't have decss in it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=css+dvd+download
This link goes through akamai and google and doesn't mention decss.
http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.google.c
This link goes through go.com, akamai, and google and doesn't mention decss:
http://transfer.go.com/cgi/transfer.pl?goto=htt
Etc.
Remember that when you say "most people" you mean "most OS researchers".
Anyone else (and maybe they're just idiots who have been mindfucked by the ParcMacWin conspiracy) would agree with Every. To them Windows, MacOS, and the RedHat distro are OS's.
It's funny that we just had a discussion about computer historians, where many people took the attitude that they're either unnecessary or just store obsolete equipment (that's an archivist, not a historian!), when this thread is a perfect example of why we need computer historians.
Sadly, words and language is not a simple formal system, as the usage of it falls into the category of communal consensual reality.
Definitions evolve and competing definitions can coexist. It's fuzzy logic; there are no absolute truth values here. But I'm no semantician; there have been many people who have spent a lot more time and intelligence dealing with the issue than I.
It really does frustrate me how juvenile so much of the discussion is here; and I don't simply mean the "Mac Suxors" comments. I'm also referring to the sloppy rhetoric that people use, employing nearly every logical fallacy under the sun, and there are a lot of them.
The most frustrating thing is that everyone on Slashdot isn't a juvenile; if they were, the juvenile behavior would be not unreasonable.
As someone who interned on the Hill, politicians read both their email and letters (where politician==staff); mass mailings are largely ignored. Mass mailings in snail mail form are popular; institutionalized grass-roots-level special interest groups (e.g. labor, religious organizations) will often give their members forms to fill out and send to their representatives. The volume is recognized, but you're not likely to get a reply if you send in something like that.
In fact, serious, well-constructed arguments are surprisingly likely to have an effect on the politician. Any letter written with any real level of seriousness, at least in the office I worked at, would get a reply. Any letter that couldn't properly be answered by a form letter (and they do have catalogs of them) will thus be read and answered by the person responsible for the policy. If you write a letter pertinent to the bills being currently debated, you're more likely to get a better answer, and you may even see your words or ideas reflected on the floor.
One trick in your letter is to claim that you got a form letter the last time. Another thing to do is to help the interns sort your mail properly. For example, if you're writing to a senator on the Labor Committee about a health issue, say that in the subject/on the envelope. If your rep has a web page that names his staff, feel free to write to the attn of the particular staff member that should handle your question/concern.
Of course, you can really only expect this of your representatives (and maybe committee chairs). If you have a disagreement with a particular rep that's not your own, write to your own rep to complain. That's why they're called "representatives".
To get back to the point, unless the staff is entirely incompentent, and they rarely are (though you can certainly expect the staff of a junior rep in the minority party to be drastically smaller and less experienced than the staff of a senior senator with a chairship), mass emails and snail-mails don't overwhelm the individual messages.
You're thinking of the Reason review, Cybersilly.
I can't make myself add yet another link to it, as there's been about 30 already, but I'll link to my metalist.
I'm asking Paulina for a response on this; she's usually pretty responsive to reasonable emails.
I personally think it's pretty accurate. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree, but there is evidence that supports Borsook's position, both anecdotal and empirical, though one can mount arguments/attacks against either form.
Anecdotal evidence is a lot easier to refute, but the empirical evidence includes the low rate of charitable giving in Silicon Valley, statistical analysis of Usenet discussions, statistical analysis of tech-oriented convention topics (like hacker cons, bionomics conference, etc.), statistical analysis of Wired articles, etc.
Of course, one can say that Usenet, tech-cons, Wired, etc. aren't truly representative of tech culture, but then, what are? Maybe it's just the loudmouths of technoculture/hackerdom that are libertarian (small l!) but it's pretty difficult to gather empirical evidence on unrecorded views.
Borsook isn't saying that everyone's a Randian, polyamorist, or free software / open source zealot; she is saying that the tech-culture (by which she is particularly referring to computer culture rather than the scientific community, biology etc.) is dominated by what she refers to as "technolibertarianism". It's "little l libertarianism" instead of "capital L Libertariansim", more an emotional/gestalt attitude than necessarily a political philosophical position. I'd say that most coders/admins (and admins in particular) have a certain deep belief in self-entitlement--they really believed that they worked hard to get where they are, and continue to work hard, and noone really helped them or encouraged them, and that they're underappreciated--and that belief extends to their understanding (or lack thereof) of history and their place in it, their feelings about societal responsibility, their feelings about government (the US government, and the institution in general), etc.
Tied into that is a degree of arrested development, a glorification of adolescent ideals (guns, cool toys, etc.), a level of social gaucheness, that can both be good--it's certainly not bad to be a bit childlike, and be more honest and excitable about beauty than some postmodern jaded bohemian, but it is bad to be childish.
Today's culture in general pushes people to become uneducated cynics, rebels without a cause. It's easy to get trapped in a teenager-like mold, where you've realized that nothing is perfect but you don't know what to do about it. It's pretty hard to find faith in this world. This is more true for techies, perhaps, than anyone else, to whom the promise of technology is so clear but the imperfection, even ugliness, of society is also so apparent.
Pretty much all Borsook is saying is that techies fall into the trap of trying to ignore, denigrate, or escape society. But they can't--especially when they're becoming ever more responsible for it. All of the topics in her book focus on just that, the intersection of techies and social change, through the Bionomics conferences, and Wired magazine, and the cypherpunks, and charity--and those intersections all are definably libertarian.
It's my fault; I submitted the review originally for Adam, and then posted it when Jon Katz wrote his article. I feel guilty now because I knew the review hadn't been rejected, but I wanted to put it up in response to Katz. So this review has appeared twice on Slashdot, but as another person said, now everyone who turns off Jon Katz can read it. Or is it Jon Katz who turns everyone off?
I'd just like to point out that links to that review have been posted about 10 times already.
(Some of the links were posted after you copied it.)
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=194
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=163
http://slashdot.org/comm ents.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=87
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=124
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=208
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=119
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=141
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=384
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=396
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=442
http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&cid=443
Reason does allow for personal, non-commercial reproduction. However, since Slashdot is a commercial venture, I'd say that copying it onto Slashdot does violate their copyright. However, since Reason would have to rely on the government in an attempt to enforce its copyright, I guess you're safe.
Somehow I'm a little confused by the idea that the tech industry was in its early days in the 1980's.
Then again, that's the kind of "there is no history" attitude that Borsook discusses.
I suspect I'm just misinterpreting you; did you really mean to say what you said?
- my review, submitted to Slashdot a week ago, and
- a comprehensive listing of reviews on Paulina Borsook's own site; both the positive and negative and in-between.
With these reviews you may be able to get a better picture of the book. You can even read a review that mirrors the style of the book.To that end, I can't say that I'm particularly convinced by the reviewer's defense against Borsook's two big arguments, which he delineates clearly in his review: "First, high-tech people have no right to attack government since their industry would not have existed without government funding. Second, successful businesses are successful because they operate in a world where governments keep schools going, food and drugs pure, banks honest, and the like."
His defense against both are ideological, pretty much "Libertarians don't believe that, we believe in spontaneous order." I think that the reviewer is accurate when he says "...[libertarians'] strongly expressed belief in a philosophy she only half-understands but associates with stinginess disturbs her."
It may be more accurate to say that Borsook only half-understands the strongly expressed belief in libertarianism, because she's never seen it work, and the closest examples to a libertarian system she can find are disasters (post-communist Russia, etc.), and most of the libertarians she meets are misogynist, or antisocial, or emotionally stunted, or selfish.
Or maybe she is wrong. It's your call.
author: Pulina Borsook
publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1891620789
pages: 256
rating: 8/10
summary: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech
I heard about Cyberselfish when driving around Vermont Memorial Day weekend from used bookstore to used bookstore. The NPR station was broadcasting an interview with Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook, a writer who worked for Wired during its glory years. I was put off by the book's wretched title, but engrossed by the subject: the powerful undercurrent of libertarianism that flows through high-tech circles. I have been astounded but not amazed at the deeply adolescent and peevish libertarian attitudes that so many techies cling to, from gun worship to fear of governmental Internet regulation. Listening to Borsook speak intelligently and cogently about technolibertarianism made me want her book very much.
This month I garnered a copy of Cyberselfish, and I'm still appalled with the title (which comes from an eponymous essay for Mother Jones she wrote in July 1996, when such cyberlanguage wasn't so cybertrite). Cyberselfish is a book-length essay, in fact a somewhat thinly edited series of linked essays. There's a rush of immediacy and wit; for a random example, "Polyamory is the preferred term of art; it's gender-neutral, where polygamy and polyandry are not, and allows for all persuasions of partner choice (gay/straight/bi/it depends)." With the freshness and informality comes flaws. There is too much repeated material in the book. It's clear that essays written at different times have been cobbled together. Reading the book straight through is like reading some multivolume series straight through, in which the characters and history are rehashed at the beginning of each book.
Cyberselfish looks at a few specific examples of technolibertarianism in depth: Bionomics, cypherpunks, Wired magazine, and Silicon Valley's impressive lack of philanthropy. Each time Borsook exposes the compassionless, fearful, posturing, politically myopic core, without dismissing the good aspects of the high-tech culture and individuals. For example, she thinks fighting for privacy rights is good, but obsessing about it and descending into rabid, paranoid ranting on alt.cypherpunks is scary. She moves smoothly from the historical to the academic to the personal, deliberately exposing her own frailities and biases while she examines those of others.
To give a deeper example of the content of Cyberselfish, Bionomics is the use of biological (and particularly Darwinian) metaphors to describe economic processes, as popularized by Michael Rothschild (Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem) and then the The Bionomics Institute (TBI). Borsook convincingly points out through both empirical observation and reasoned analysis that Bionomics boils down to economic libertarianism, where government involvement is wrong and the most cut-throat, efficient and entrepeneurial businesses are the best. Ecological metaphors are used in Bionomics only when they're useful and sexy: The ecosystem of Hawaii was used as a metaphor for the fragility of protected industries. Under Bionomics logic, Hawaii's beautiful, lush, peaceful ecosystem is to be derided. Bionomics uses metaphors to draw syllogistic conclusions. Doing that can be powerfully convincing but amounts to hand-waving and emotional appeals. Borsook cuts through the smoke and mirrors.
After a few years, the Bionomics Institute conferences were (literally) taken over by the Cato Institute, the premier libertarian think tank in the nation. The annual Bionomics conterences began in 1993. The 1997 conference was the Cato/Bionomics Conference; 1998, the "Annual Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP Conference on Technology and Society." TBI morphed into software-startup Maxager, which intends to offer Bionomical tools to companies. Borsook wonders what meaning can be ascribed to the success or the failure of the company. If Maxager fails, is it because it wasn't Bionomically good enough, or just because of the many uncontrollable factors that cause the vast majority of startups to fail? If it succeeds, does it validate Bionomics, or just the good connections the founder has with Silicon Valley venture capitalists?
The other chapters are just as interesting. Cyberselfish sharply describes all the archetypes of the technolibertarians, from the neo-hippie polyandric Burning Man attendee to the Lexus-driving, 100-hour-a-week, plugged-in entrepeneur with a sprawling bungalow in Santa Clara county.
One of the most crystalline passages in the book describes Eric Raymond's leaking of the Halloween Document, written by Microsoft program manager Vinod Valloppillil. The two clearly have vast ideological differences, the open-source cowboy and the Evil Empire functionary, but they're both hard-core libertarians, an entirely unreported fact. In Borsook's words, "It was rather like discovering that both a liberal and a conservative senator had both acquired their law degrees from Yale: no news here."
As I said before, the book is somewhat haphazardly put together, and nearly every sentence is to some degree contentious; even someone who agrees with her basic position will find reason to quibble. Cyberselfish doesn't come near to answering all the questions it raises. Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians celebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective. What does it mean to be an Open Source libertarian?
I personally think it's somewhat unfair to attack those flaws, as they're inexorably part of Cyberselfish's loose, immediate, opinionated, and conversational style. It's kind of like how Slashdot's open forums allow for a review like this and the inevitable "hot grits" responses.
They fixed the pictures--no more fame for macki.
Never mind; they fixed the pictures. There were originally only two pictures instead of three; the top picture was of Emmanuel and Macki standing next to each other. The picture of Jon is new.
Sorry: macki.
Jes so you know, the bluehaired guy is not
Jon Johansen. It's Makie, a 2600/cDc guy.
Jon Johansen is a crewcut, glasses wearing
kid. Makie and Jon do both look eternally
sleep deprived.
I'd just like to say that I don't really consider the post flamebait, and I don't currently have any moderator points to throw around.
The attitude is definitely flammable, but the point is real.